I have mentioned the OER University initiative in the past, which I think is the way to go for universities chasing a social agenda (as opposed to commercial MOOCs which are more about marketing and commercial positioning).

If you are interested in OERs these 2 items I found via Stephen Downes blog are worth a look.

“These investigations include the perceptions of stakeholders in post-secondary education towards the OERu concept, combined with a look at economic models for universities to consider in implementing OER assessment and accreditation policies.”

The second item is a paper about finding OERs. The Commonwealth of Learning has the Directory of Open Educational Resources(DOER) portal which is a manually created and annotated database. This paper describes a text mining project currently being developed that could become a ‘Google’ like search engine for OERs.

“…this paper proposes OERScout, a technology framework based on text mining solutions. The objectives of our work are to (i) develop a technology framework which will parametrically measure the usefulness of an OER for a particular academic purpose based on the openness, accessibility, and relevance attributes; and (ii) provide academics with a mechanism to locate OER which are of an acceptable academic standard. From our user tests, we have identified that OERScout is a sound solution for effectively zeroing in on OER which can be readily used for teaching and learning purposes.”

It’s not ready yet but if they get it off the ground it plug a significant gap.

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